Virginia News Headlines: Tuesday Morning

Here are a few Virginia (and national) news headlines, political and otherwise, for Tuesday, August 27. Also, check out the video about how we really shoud name our national disasters. I’ve got a few more suggestions: Hurricane Ken Cuccinelli, Tropical Storm EW Jackson, Superstorm Mark Obenshain…all (un)natural disasters!

*Humans’ complicity in climate change can’t be ignored (“The scientists are set to claim that the increasing amount of greenhouse gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere has almost certainly been the chief driver of the warming of the planet over the past half-century, a finding to which they ascribe 95 percent confidence. That’s the level of likelihood researchers typically consider robust enough to justify drawing very strong conclusions.”)

*Why Ken Cuccinelli Is the Anti-Chris Christie (“Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP’s floundering gubernational candidate in Virginia, would be wise to take a page of out of Chris Christie’s blue-state playbook. But it might be too late, writes Lloyd Green.”)

*Rubio to stump for Cuccinelli in Virginia (Hey, one of the climate science-denying natural disasters is coming to campaign for Ken Kookinelli. Surprised? I’m not – cuckoo birds of a feather flock together.)

The key quote by “Benjamin Franklin,” addressing “John Adams” and urging him to delete language in the Declaration of Independence about freeing the slaves. More broadly, what this dialog highlights is the extremely messy, flawed, oh-so-human compromise that resulted in the Declaration of Independence (specifically, in this case, regarding the bitter, unreconcilable debate over slavery with the representatives from the deep South, particularly South Carolina). This is utterly at odds with Ken Cuccinelli’s view – shared by EW Jackson, and presumably Mark Obenshain as well – that the Constitution was handed down by Moses from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets, that it’s some sort of perfect document that should never be reinterpreted (except when it’s convenient for their own, right-wing activist views, of course). I’d love to see Ben Franklin and John Adams (and Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the delegates in Philadelphia that summer of ’76) be resurrected so they could address the nonsense spewing from Tea Partiers like Antonin Scalia, Ken Cuccinelli, EW Jackson, etc. It would be a sight to behold…

“Besides, what will posterity think we were, demigods? We’re men, no more, no less. Trying to get a nation started against greater odds than a more generous god would have allowed. First things first, John. Independence America. If we don’t secure that, what difference will the rest make?